


about damn time

by dirgewithoutmusic



Series: bringing the war home [9]
Category: Ant-Man (2015), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, So uh i watched antman, and then i tripped over some hope feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 20:07:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4362431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hope van Dyne was scared of heights from age seven onwards. The first time she had to get on a plane (age ten), she sat stony-faced, staring out the window, not looking at her father, the half-moons of her nails biting deep into her chubby palms. When she was thirteen years old, she asked her father for flying lessons.</p><p> </p><p>That should have been her first hint, that when she asked for flying lessons for her birthday, he did not automatically realize this was about her mother.</p><p>But perhaps-- perhaps even if it had been true, the airplane crash, perhaps her father still would not have understood. He was not the kind of man who found the things he feared most, tracked them down, and then slew them with their own poison.</p>
            </blockquote>





	about damn time

Hope van Dyne was scared of heights from age seven onwards. The first time she had to get on a plane (age ten), she sat stony-faced, staring out the window, not looking at her father, the half-moons of her nails biting deep into her chubby palms. When she was thirteen years old, she asked her father for flying lessons. 

 

That should have been her first hint, that when she asked for flying lessons for her birthday, he did not automatically realize this was about her mother. 

But perhaps-- perhaps even if it had been true, the airplane crash, perhaps her father still would not have understood. He was not the kind of man who found the things he feared most, tracked them down, and then slew them with their own poison. 

 

Hope knew these things about her mother: 

\- She smelled like honeysuckle but sang like a throat-sore sparrow

\- She had fallen in love with Hope's father's eyebrows first, then his brain, then his hands, and then his smile. 

\- Whether it was dinner parties, civil rights, or trouble, she hated being left out of anything. 

\- She had died in a plane crash. She had fallen to her death. 

 

Hope's father went away and he never came back, not in any way that mattered. 

Hope flew little two-seater gliders all through high school. She took her girl friends up to shriek and stare. She did not take her father. She won races, medals, and ribbons, and kept them neatly sorted in one of the drawers of her bedside table. 

The science was as close as she could get to her father in those years. She wasn't sure what to make of that. She wasn't sure if that was why she was here, elbows deep in physics texts at sixteen--or working in two labs while she aced her undergrad classes and then her grad work too--or clawing her way up the corporate ladder until she was chairman of the board of the company that had his name plastered on its windows and letterhead. 

Was she here because if she just got smarter, he might look at her? Because she wanted to know what was so interesting in those beeping machines and graph paper notebooks that he never really managed to glance her way? (Even when he did, she could see formulas whizzing by in the backs of his eyes.) 

Or was it because this was his kingdom--her inheritance? Because she wanted to claim everything she had a right to, and a bit more that she didn't, and then walk away without looking back? 

 

None of it came easy to her. It had been what her father breathed. When he adopted Cross, when Hope met him, she would see that Cross breathed it too.  
_Genius._ It was a word exhaled around their dinner table. The Pyms and van Dynes were geniuses-- her father, her mother, these brilliant wayward boys her dad took in, looking for a son. 

Hope took IQ tests over and over, at thirteen, until she finally reached a significantly above average score. Then she kept taking them until she hit genius. She read studies later, about the inefficacy of IQ tests and "intelligence" tests in general, but she didn't mind. This hadn't been about smarts. This had been about proving something. 

The ants did not come easy to her, either. First, they did not come easy because her father didn't sit her down and tell her to have them fetch sugar cubes. He just used them, in front of her, careless, like he thought she wouldn't notice. Once he realized she wasn't oblivious, he showed off for her, like a magic trick. ( _Watch for the Grand Pym! He's about to disappear before your very eyes!_ She had seen enough magic tricks from her father). 

But she watched him-- the way he could hear fine without the hearing aid, the way he brushed it sometimes when he was trying to communicate something difficult or was just off his game. So she stole it from his bedside table, on nights he'd had a nightcap of brandy, and went out to the garden to practice.

Hope had always loved the house. Even in the worst of it--when she burned his Christmas cards before she even opened them, when she fell asleep at four in the morning at her desk at work, desperate for something--she had loved the house. She didn't think about it then, just emailed suppliers and managed schedules and scrawled out rough sketches of mechanisms on her whiteboards. 

But when Cross finally went too far, she went back and knocked on that old front door. When her father opened the door and she stepped inside, her first thought was _I forgot how much I love this place_ and her second was _he's older._

But so was she. She sat out in the grass, in the chill of San Francisco after midnight, and tried to master the device her father was hiding in a hearing aid.  
She found the plans locked up in his lab and read her way through them. She tried large groups and small groups of insects, varied commands, varied focuses. She smiled at Cross and asked him about good meditation classes. 

By the time her father found out, she was painting things with them, out on the cracked backyard patio. Red and black volcanic landscapes, rolling seas at the tail end of sunset. When he came out to glower and then shout, she had the red ants make themselves into a 3D replica of the Golden Gate Bridge and smiled at him. "You should be proud," she said, and walked back inside the house. 

The bullet ants were her favorite. Scott, when he came, preferred the flighted ones. Her father did not prefer any, just gave them numbers and sulked in his house, saved the world from things he had found first. She suspected her mother would have preferred the fire ants-- the architects, her father had called them, most famous for their bite. 

 

Peggy Carter and Janet van Dyne had both been the best friends of arrogant little mad scientists, so they had decided to befriend each other as well. Hope had grown up with a steady older English woman with a spine like spiral steel at her birthdays and summer barbecues. Peggy, and Howard if he hadn't fallen out of Hank's good graces lately, would always bring her the best presents. 

Peggy was not one for telling stories, even to Hope, who wanted to hear them all, but sometimes she would stay after all the other guests had left. Peggy and Janet would drink port in the living room and talk late into the night about war and compromise, creative geniuses and their toys, or good hair stylists. Hope would sneak out and slip behind the couch with her soft baby blanket and curl up to listen. 

Sometimes, when it got very late, Peggy would talk about Steve, the Commandos, and her first war. (When Hope read about the war in her history classes, she would have imagined faces and described pranks to put to the historic battles and names). 

Years after her mother's death, after Peggy's dementia had set in, Hope stood in the old house, where she was much too big now to fit behind the living room couch. Both of those women were gone, but she dredged up words she barely remembered, words she had buried deep: "It was her choice." _Give her the dignity of her choice, dad._

 

Gratitude can be forgiveness. Gratitude. What was she grateful for, here? She wasn't sure her father had done his best, but maybe he had. Maybe this was all the love and respect and sense he had in him-- maybe this was his best. He could save the world. He couldn't save her mother, but Hope couldn't either. She tried not to hate him for that, from the start and even when she knew the whole story. 

He had left a grieving seven year old alone for weeks. He never came back, not really. Maybe this was his best. 

She was forgiving him, piece by piece. It was not gratitude, for the hero, or for the father, or for the inventor. It was because she loved him, and she loved the old house, and she wanted something to come home to. She was older now and she could make her own choices. 

 

Her father gave her wings. But no, that wasn't quite it-- her father offered to help her build her wings. Her mother had left them to her. 

Hope would get up, at three in the morning, or just before late winter sunrises, when the whole house was asleep, and she would go down to the workroom to look at the suit. The fabric. The delicate electronics, slowly coming together. The wings--translucent and elegant, sculpted and fine. 

Her mother had left her wings. Her mother had fallen to her death-- was still falling, maybe, down to places so small that _place_ and _small_ and _falling_ lost their meaning. Her mother had fallen to her death, but she had left Hope her wings and she had left her her name. 

 

Hope van Dyne was scared of heights from age seven onwards. When she was thirteen years old, she asked her father for flying lessons.


End file.
